Obituary

Winifred Foley

Winifred Foley, who wrote her first book, A Child In The Forest, at age 60. Photograph: David Crump

Winifred Foley, who has died aged 94, was 60 and living in rural isolation with her woodman husband when her first and only significant book was published. The radio was one of her few daytime companions, and it was through Radio 4's Woman's Hour that her book A Child in the Forest, set in the Forest of Dean in west Gloucestershire in the 1920s, took shape.

In the late 1960s, the social historian John Burnett, a pioneer of the concept of autobiography as source material for studying working-class lives, appealed to the programme's listeners for unpublished material. Among the sheaves of dog-eared, handwritten exercise books that came his way was a bundle more bulky and dog-eared than most. Undaunted, he read it, and was sufficiently impressed to pass it on to Pamela Howe, a radio producer then working on a regional edition of Woman's Hour in Bristol.

Equally intrigued, Howe lost little time in crossing the Severn bridge to meet the author, and the first result of their cooperation, early in 1973, was a Woman's Hour serial, adapted by Virginia Browne-Wilkinson. The book, attractively packaged by the BBC, followed in 1974. Various further editions have followed, and a revised version titled Full Hearts and Empty Bellies has just been published by Abacus.

Foley was never slow to acknowledge the part played by her collaborators, notably Howe. She was also fortunate in her timing, since the mid-1970s, as today, was a period in which there was a yearning among many to escape from the harsh realities of life, and nostalgia for real or imagined rural simplicities was high on the agenda.

Her memoirs sold largely to a middle-class readership that was already lapping up James Herriot's vet series, Miss Read's Fairacre novels and, then as now, Flora Thompson's revived Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy. Edith Holden's nature notes of 1906, winsomely repackaged as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, followed in 1977, while Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie continued to flourish. Foley's book, while selling fewer than these, deservedly ranked alongside them in the vanguard of the genre.

Despite this, her relationship with the middle classes was always ambivalent. A Child in the Forest - beginning in the hard-pressed mining village of Brierley, near Cinderford, where she was born Winifred Mason, and continuing into her early years in domestic service in London, Cheltenham and elsewhere - is unashamedly earthy, unsentimental and stark. The two greatest influences on her thinking, her miner father and her husband Syd, both played their part in shaping her fiercely socialist views.

Yet it was establishment figures who transformed her life - Burnett and the various well-connected literary ladies at the BBC, and the writer Julian Mitchell, who adapted the book into the drama Abide with Me for BBC television in 1976. It was filmed again in 2001, this time under its original title, in an adaptation by Julia Jones for HTV West.

Foley was grateful for this enthusiasm for the book, but still confused. "I think I come out of it as a very ordinary little girl, with all the usual faults," she said. "I wouldn't have been surprised, after it had been published, if decent people hadn't wanted to know me." At the time, the Foleys were living in a tied cottage in woodland on the Huntley Manor estate, west of Gloucester, where Syd worked in a sawmill. It was with genuine relief that she heard that the book had been well received down the track at the "big house".

In later years she enjoyed her status as a local celebrity and encourager of good causes, especially if they involved young people, but it was not always so. Twenty-two years of bringing up four children in the woods had at first left her agoraphobic, not simply reluctant to walk to the village for the shops or bus, but genuinely fearful.

Earnings from the book brought the Foleys a pleasant house at Cliffords Mesne, in the north-west Gloucestershire countryside near Newent. Syd, a thoughtful man, remained loving and supportive of his wife up to his death in 1998, but at first he found her fame difficult to handle. It was not what he expected retirement to be like in a male-dominated, rural district such as Dean.

Lesser works of autobiography followed: No Pipe Dreams for Father in 1977, Back to the Forest in 1981 and In and Out of the Forest - first published in 1984 and later rewritten. Foley fretted that, being produced by local publishers, they would suffer through less stringent editing than her first book, but they were received enthusiastically in the locality.

Some in the Forest believed that she, or her BBC collaborators, had portrayed the Dean of the 1920s as too poverty-stricken. And like Lee, on the other side of the Severn, she discovered that Gloucestershire family histories can lead to sibling feuds.

However, her family life remained strong and happy in the Cheltenham retirement flat in which she spent her final years, and her daughter Jenny was at her bedside when she died in the town's general hospital.

She is also survived by her sons Chris, Richard and Nick, 10 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

• Winifred Mary Foley, writer, born 25 July 1914; died 21 March 2009

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